Corsair M65 RGB

I can shoot a rainbow, shoot a rainbow, shoot a rainbow toooo

What is the computer mouse missing? It already has buttons, wheels, lasers, optics, weights, pulleys, secret chambers for hiding priests and fluffy patches you can stroke to reduce blood pressure. The bespectacled, white-coated boffins at Corsair, however, think they’ve struck upon the answer. What the computer mouse needs now, more than anything, is colour!

That’s right, the thing hidden beneath your hand needs to be more colourful, to be a resplendent peacock advertising its virility in the hope other mice from across the district will come and mate with it. The M65 RGB claims to be able to display 16.8 million colours, which is presumably a rounded-up figure representing the 16,777,216 colours of the 24-bit RGB colour spectrum. The human eye, in comparison, can distinguish around 10 million colours.

Battlefield Hardline

The handcuffs are off as the cops-and-robbers shooter comes to Xbox – and we’ve gone hands-on with the beta

Balancing a game of cops and robbers can’t be easy – not with all those doughnuts those police officers keep stuffing down their throats, right guys? – which is one of the reasons why Battlefield Hardline’s release date slipped from last November to this March.

After gauging feedback from a multiplayer beta test on PC and PS4 last summer, the decision was made to delay the game so Visceral could make some further balancing tweaks. By the time you read this, the second (and hopefully final) multiplayer beta, which began 3 February, will be in full swing – and this time Xbox owners are invited to the party.

MSI 970 Gaming

Bargain-priced AMD 970 board anyone? Anyone?

You might think there’s as much point building a new motherboard based on the elderly AMD 970 chipset as there is making a new transmission for a Model T Ford. But there is some method to MSI’s madness. AMD has more or less given up on its FX range of CPUs, we can pretty much all agree, but it has gone and released some ‘new’ chips over the last six months.

We’re using the floating punctuation there because none of the latest procs are using AMD’s latest x86 CPU architecture, sticking instead with the old, inefficient Piledriver design. It did release the 9000 series processors however, with huge 220W TDPs and ambitious base and turbo clocks. Where this latest board makes sense though is with the lower powered E-series chips AMD also released late last year. The FX-8320E and FX-8370E are both 95W parts and that’s what MSI has designed its 970 Gaming to support.

AMD FX-8320E

A budget octo-core CPU, but is it cheap enough?

WHEN AMD TELLS US it’s sending over a new FX-series CPU, we can’t help the sudden rush of excitement. It’s an automatic response, born of a time when a new AMD CPU had the potential to offer something genuinely competitive. But those days seem long gone. All we get now are half-hearted revisions of increasingly elderly chips.

The FX-8320E is the perfect example of that. AMD released this chip late last year, along with the FX-8370E as a pair of lower-powered octo-core CPUs for the more power-conscious consumer. These two chips use AMD’s Bulldozer processor tech and squeeze into a 95W TDP. They’re able to do this by utilising a lower base clock, retaining the same Turbo clock as their non-E brethren. To that end, this FX-8320E is running at 3.2GHz as standard, with the ability to hit 4GHz as needed. The standard FX-8320’s clockspeed sits some 300MHz higher at 3.5GHz.

Woojer

Haptic feedback for your moobs

A silent, wearable woofer. That’s the claim Woojer is making about its… er… Woojer. It truly is a bizarre little device, designed to translate sound into feeling with the idea of immersing you more deeply into the music you’re listening to, game you’re playing, or movie you’re watching.

And how is it to do this? By sitting in the middle of your chest, or just above your bottom, vibrating at different levels depending on the bass notes being pumped out of your system. Using a 3.5mm jack, you plug the Woojer into your PC and then your headset (or speakers) into a second 3.5mm output on the wee device. The Woojer then picks up the sound passing through it and vibrates. With its placement on either your breastplate or at the base of your spine, the Woojer is meant to translate the basspicked rumbling throughout your body to fool your brain into believing the effect was all-encompassing. And bless it, the Woojer certainly does try.